Monday, March 26, 2012

The volume number 247 of Quaternary International intituled “Neanderthal Home Spatial and Social Behaviours” resulted from the International Workshop “The Neanderthal Home: Spatial and Social Behaviour” organized by the IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social) on October 2009 at Tarragona (Spain). The 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Abric Romaní site, an event that is in keeping with the beginning of research on Prehistory in the Iberian Peninsula, and also the celebration of the 25 years of excavation of the IPHES research team at the site, was the perfect occasion and opportunity to organize this meeting.

Neanderthals cannot be understood and discussed without considering the research carried out on the Abric Romaní archaeological site. It is one of the most relevant Middle Palaeolithic sites, with a long and well studied sequence of more than 30,000 years of continues occupation by Neanderthals groups.

This meeting made it possible to gather some of the most foremost international specialists. It also offered the perfect opportunity to discuss and update the most significant research topics on Neanderthal behaviours, and provided new information about the behaviour and the social and spatial organization of this extinct human population. More than 60 scientists from all over the world, specialists in different areas, contributed presentations about these topics to the conference. New data from archaeological sites in France, Germany, South Africa, Italy, Caucasus, Belgium, Israel, Gibraltar, Jordan, and Spain were discussed during the workshop and are published in this monographic volume.

This volume is intended to represent the variability of approaches in current Neanderthal behaviour research, and the great potential of these topics and methodologies for understanding the human past. It tried to accommodate a diversity of opinions and perspectives that reflect the plurality of viewpoints among contemporary researchers. The ranges of topics covered include genetics, dating, paleoecology, geoarchaeology, micromorphology, zooarchaeology, taphonomy, lithic technology, spatial pattern analysis, and paleoanthropoloy, among others. The contributors to this volume provide important new insights that help us to better appreciate and understand the Neanderthals.